When it came to my piano exam at the academy of music in 1995 , I decided to play an own composition. This piece started with three slow and soft figures, not really diatonic but with a certain feeling of a subdominant - dominant - tonic-relation (which can explained to non-musicians as a principle of breathing-in, breathing stronger in, and releasing the breath). This is what I call my triadic principle. Then a repetition of a single tone set in like coming from a distant piano (I imagined an old nocturnal mansion with two pianos responding to each other from different rooms). My composition at that time proceeded differently but recalled that first bars from time to time.
The profs graded my playing quite high but they were honest and admitted that this was due to my composition in particular – which they liked.

I think the score of that piece is lying somewhere in a drawer but I actually forgot the music ... apart from those three melodious figures at the beginning of the piece. They calmed me deeply whenever I played or heard them and I liked the idea of the two corresponding pianos in different parts of an old house or castle.

So I decided to extend the piece admittedly by using other three-figure-groups but holding on the principle of breathing in and releasing. An eight minute version came into being at first, but it always should have become a long meditation during about 45 minutes or even an hour. I completed that long version in winter 2012, recorded it as a final version in 2020 (which I overworked in fact in 2022).

In contrast to the ›Melophilia‹ album with its catchy tunes that I often played in concerts this piece is be rather a music for myself. It had to be recorded for no further reason than just – to be there!

I hope that there will be listeners who like this extended moment of calmness as much as I do.

_____

All music and words by Lyhrus
Artwork by Lyhrus